Chess coaching is priced for the few. Most of us were never in the room.

I looked for a chess coach before I wrote a line of EloCoach. I want to be fair to the people I talked to, because they are good at something hard. But the shape of the offer stopped me every time.

The quotes I got were not for a lesson. They were for a programme: a package, a term, a commitment, with a number attached that was closer to a lease payment than to a hobby. I did not want to buy a course. I wanted someone to look at my last twenty games and tell me, specifically, what I keep doing.

The price is not greed. It is arithmetic.

A coach has a fixed number of hours. Every hour spent on you is an hour not spent on someone else, and the best coaches fill up. When supply is capped and demand is not, price goes up, and the people who get priced out are the ones who most need a first push: the players who lose the same way again and again and do not know why.

Those players are most of everyone who plays chess online. They are not in the room. They are watching a video at 1.5x speed, which is a fine way to see ideas and a bad way to get feedback on your own moves.

What an improving player actually needs from a coach

If you strip away the programme and the branding, the most valuable thing a coach does for an improving player is small and repetitive:

• Look at your real games, not model games.
• Notice what recurs.
• Say it plainly, and say it again when it happens again.
• Notice when you stopped, and say that too.

That list is expensive for a human, because each item eats attention hours. It is cheap for software, because it is mostly bookkeeping on top of engines that already exist. Stockfish and Maia run on your phone, so the heaviest part of the work does not cost us a cent per game. What does cost money is the language model that explains the result, and I will be honest about those numbers in a later post.

What this is not

EloCoach is not a claim that software coaches better than a strong human who knows you. It does not. A good coach sees your psychology, your schedule, the tournament you are nervous about. We see games.

What we can do is be there at midnight after a bad blitz session, for the price of a subscription, on the games you actually played. For a lot of players the choice was never “AI coach or human coach”. It was “AI coach or nothing”. That is the gap I care about.